


Vintage Bisexuals

by storytellerluna



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 20:31:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12515960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storytellerluna/pseuds/storytellerluna
Summary: Steve Rogers learns to overcome 1940's ideas about bisexuality, and allows himself to fall in love with James Buchanan Barnes.





	Vintage Bisexuals

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you guys enjoy it! This is my first published fanfic

“Don’t be greedy.  You have to choose one.”

That was what Steve Rogers had heard over and over growing up in Brooklyn.  He was small, skinny, and shy, and never felt comfortable talking to girls, but that wasn’t anything to worry about.  Plenty of kids were shy.  And in his childhood, when he preferred the company of other boys, no one bothered him about that either.  But when he hit puberty, and the other boys his age started flirting with the girls, taking them dancing, and even asking their parents for permission to marry, Steve did not join them.  He seemed afraid to.

“What is wrong with you, Steven?” his grandmother asked him one day.  “Don’t you like any of those girls?  They’re fine girls, and you’re growing into a fine young man.  You could make a very good match with one of them.”

Steve just nodded.  Truth be told, he did admire some of the girls.  Some of them were pretty, some were funny, some were bold, some were good dancers, and all of these were appealing qualities to him, but still he did not ask any of them to dance.  Because truth be told, he admired several of the boys as well.  This was confusing, and he had no idea what to do about it.

When he started dating Bucky, it got worse.  He was a young man dating another young man, and to everyone in Brooklyn, that meant he was “a homosexual.”  He didn’t feel like one, but then again, he supposed he didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like.

“I’m sure you’ll get over this disturbing phase eventually,” his pastor said.  “You’ll pick a nice girl and settle down, and be as God wants you to be.”

 _And how do_ you _know what God wants for me_ , Steve wondered, but he didn’t say it out loud.  And after a while, he started wondering if maybe they were right.  Maybe there _was_ something wrong with him.

In fact, there was plenty wrong with him.  In addition to his asthma and his chronic colds, he had heart trouble and nervous trouble, and he had gotten scarlet fever as a child, which had left him with several long-term health issues.  Besides, his mother worked in a tuberculosis ward, which put their whole family in danger of TB.  Mentally, he added his confusing sexual feelings to the end of this increasingly long list.  Asthma, chronic colds, scarlet fever, possible TB, and bisexuality.

Then the war started, and things just got a whole lot worse.

“Hey Steve, you punk,” Bucky greeted him one day, laughing.  “Don’t hang around inside all day, let’s go out!  Let’s go to the World’s Fair.”

Steve couldn’t help but smile.  Bucky wore a brand-new US Army uniform, freshly pressed with buttons shining, and it made him look even more handsome than he always was.  Still, even then, there was sadness behind his joy.  The uniform meant that Bucky would be leaving him soon.  The uniform didn’t belong to his boyfriend Bucky, it belonged to Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes of the 107th.  Bucky was someone Steve would follow anywhere.  Sgt. Barnes was someone Steve would not be allowed to follow.  With all his diseases, Steve had no hope of ever being allowed to join the army.  He had submitted five different – illegal – enlistment forms in five different states, but none of them worked, and he was beginning to realize that he would never be able to join Bucky on the European front lines.

“You know, Buck, if they find out you’re gay, they might not let you in the army,” Steve pointed out.

Bucky laughed again.  “And you’re the resident expert on not being allowed in the army, aren’tcha?  Don’t worry, Steve, I asked some girls along, so they’ll never know,” and he winked mischievously. 

“I don’t know, Bucky.  I’ve been thinking… I think I’m going to try again.”

“You join the army, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

“And you won’t?”

“You think I would leave you like that?  Steve, please.  I’m with you till the end of the line.”  He leaned forward and gently kissed Steve, and they stayed that way for a while, embracing in the shadows behind their Brooklyn apartment building.

“I like this,” Steve whispered.  “I like what we have here.  I don’t want to lose this.”

“You won’t.  I’m coming back,” Bucky promised.

“No, I won’t lose it because I’m coming with you,” Steve insisted.  “I may be diseased and broken, but you make me feel less broken somehow.  You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Buck.  Somehow, I will find a way to convince the enlistment officers to let me join up, and we can stay together.  To the end of the line.”

He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he knew there had to be a way.

 

A few months later, with the help of a scientist named Abraham Erskine, Steve Rogers sat on a US army base, a place he never actually thought he would ever find himself.  Erskine had explained his plan and the super soldier serum, but even still, Steve didn’t think he would last long at the base.  Erskine seemed to have faith in him, but no one else did.  He was smaller by far than everyone else there, and he could never keep up with them when they went running.  The army commander definitely did not think he would last the week, and never failed to tell him so.  Maybe the commander was right.  Maybe the army just wasn’t the place for him.

“Something the matter, Rogers?” a woman’s voice asked in a pleasant British accent.  Steve glanced up and saw Agent Peggy Carter, and smiled politely at her, even though he didn’t feel much like smiling.  Peggy was kind to him, which was good, and she was bold in the face of blatant sexism from the other men, which was better.  Steve admired Peggy quite a lot, in fact, but he didn’t think he had a chance with her.  Besides, he was still broken and sick, wasn’t he?  No one would ever want to spend their life with him.

“Rogers?” Peggy asked again.  Her eyes showed real concern.  “Steve?  Are you alright?”

Steve sighed.  “I don’t think I belong here,” he admitted.

“Nonsense,” Peggy scoffed as she took a seat next to him.  “You’re the best candidate on this military base, and the rest of them are all idiots if they can’t see it.  But I can see it, and I’ll tell you something else: Professor Erskine sees it too.  If he hadn’t thought you were good enough, we wouldn’t have brought you here.”

“I guess I’m just barely good enough, then,” Steve muttered.

“You are beyond good enough,” Peggy exclaimed.  “You are great, Steve.  No one else I’ve ever met would have thought of unhooking that flag pole the other day.  The rest of the men on this base think with their muscles or what’s between their legs, but you?  You think with your brain, and you have a beautiful, caring heart.  That’s a beautiful quality for a person to have.  And you’re incredibly brave, too.”

Now it was Steve’s turn to scoff.  “How am I brave?”

“You jumped on a grenade you thought was active, Rogers.”

Steve sighed again.  Peggy had a lot of good points, but she didn’t really know him that well yet.  She didn’t know him like Bucky did.  Sure, she knew he was a skinny asthmatic kid with nervous problems, and he was sure she had read his file, so she undoubtedly knew about his scarlet fever and TB history.  And sure, she saw good qualities somewhere among all those setbacks, but even with all of that, she did not know everything.  She didn’t know about his sexuality.  Only Bucky knew about that.

Peggy noticed how awkward he was, and decided that perhaps he needed some time to himself.  She didn’t want to be rude, and she definitely didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable.  Silently, she stood up, smoothed out her skirt, and headed slowly for the door.

As she reached the door, she turned around to look at him again.  “You should go talk to the professor,” she said, smiling kindly at him.  “But I hope you know this.  We _do_ like you here.”  Then she left.

He watched her go.  _Stupid,_ he mentally chastised himself.  _Why can’t I ever talk to a girl?_   Agent Carter was a fantastic woman, too.  The more he thought about her, or saw her around the base, the more he realized that he really liked her.  Then, as soon as he realized that, he was sent spiraling back into another mental crisis.  “You have to choose one,” they had told him in Brooklyn.  He couldn’t be attracted to girls if he was attracted to boys, because that was a sickness, and a terribly ungodly one according to his pastor.  Being attracted to boys at all was a sickness according to his pastor.  In fact, most of the people he encountered in Brooklyn seemed to think that way. 

Then why did he feel so guilty when he thought about how much he liked Peggy?  There shouldn’t be anything wrong with that, he thought.  She was a woman, and he was a man, and if he wanted to do something romantic like take her dancing, that would be perfectly acceptable, even encouraged.  But somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.  He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Bucky. 

A thought struck him, and he ran to Erskine’s lab.  He found the scientist measuring some kind of liquid into test tubes, and wasted no time in spilling out every thought that had suddenly filled his mind.

“Doctor, if I say yes to your experiments and let you inject this serum into me, what will happen?  I’m a pretty far shot from being the ‘perfect man,’ I think my time here has proved I’m not a soldier, and I’m sick in a variety of different ways.  What if we do this, and it doesn’t work?  What if I’m not the right candidate?  You said this was the only serum sample you had…”

“Steven,” the doctor said, cutting him off before he had the opportunity to fret even more, “I am positive you are the right candidate.  Don’t worry.  If it works the way it is supposed to, it will eliminate all your body’s infirmities.  It is designed to create the perfect soldier, illnesses are not a part of the formula.  In other words, you will never have to worry about scarlet fever again, or any other diseases for that matter.  But I warn you, the process will be painful-”

_You’d never have to worry about any diseases ever again._

Solemnly, Steve nodded.  “I accept.”

 

As the bombs burst in the air all around their small plane, and explosions lit up the ground far below, Steve Rogers stared out at the war-torn landscape, deep in thought.  He’d been in the war for a while now, but he still hadn’t seen that much action.  Still, he knew he could handle it – with Erskine’s super soldier serum, he was at his physical peak, the strongest he had ever been.  The scientist had calculated everything correctly.  Steve no longer had asthma, he no longer fatigued easily, he was no longer a 90-pound twig of a boy hardly fit for labor.  Now, he was healthy, stable, an icon.  The kind of man people would look up to.  The perfect soldier.

Except that he was currently disobeying a direct order from a superior officer.

“Your audience contained what was left of the 107th,” Peggy had said to him.  She’d been trying to explain why the troop’s morale was so low.  She didn’t know what kind of affect her words would have, but they had spurred him to action better than anything else ever had.  “The rest have been killed or captured,” she had said.  The rest of the 107th, killed or captured.  400 men… including Bucky.

He had finally managed to join the army and get himself overseas, and now he was risking everything, even his life, for Bucky.  But he didn’t want to risk other people’s lives as well.  Peggy sat next to him now in the back of the plane, and their friend Howard Stark was in the cockpit.  He couldn’t ask them to die for this.  Solemnly, he ordered them to turn the plane around and go back to Allied airspace.

And then he jumped.

He angled his body to avoid the blasts of enemy fire as he plummeted to the ground.  Briefly, he thought of Peggy and Howard.  He didn’t know if he would get the chance to see them again.  He hoped he would, but there was no time to dwell on that.  All of his focus had to be on Bucky now.

He ran through the woods, keeping his head low, keeping his footsteps muffled, the whole way to the Hydra base.  Not once did his thoughts stray from his boyfriend.  He effortlessly knocked out two enemy soldiers and hitched a ride into the base in their truck.  He had to rescue the 107th no matter what.  If Bucky died… he didn’t even want to think about that.

Once inside, he darted through the shadows, unnoticed, to the prison cells below the base and knocked the lock off the doors with one swing.  As the liberated men of the 107th swarmed around him, he scanned their faces for the one he knew, but in vain.

“James Barnes?” Steve cried into the throng, hoping someone would answer.  “Do any of you know a Sergeant Barnes?”

“They took some of us to a different wing, over there,” one of the men explained, and pointed the way.  Steve just nodded solemnly, then gestured for them to flee before heading off on his own.

He ran through various twisting passageways which all looked the same, turned corner after corner, and peered in doorway after doorway.  He liberated hundreds of prisoners from various cells inside the Hydra base, but still he pressed on.  He knew only one thing for certain: he was not leaving this place without Bucky Barnes by his side.

All of a sudden, he spotted something out of the corner of his eye which caught his attention: all the rooms he had run past in this particular hallway had been abandoned, but this one had a body in it.  Steve slipped agilely through the doorway into a room full of scientific equipment, and a person strapped to a table in the middle.  An American POW, and a man Steve knew better than any other.

“Bucky.”

Bucky muttered incoherently – he was barely conscious.  Quickly, Steve untied him and helped him to stand.  “Bucky, it’s me.”

Bucky’s eyes flickered open as he leaned against Steve’s chest, which was a lot more muscular than he remembered.  He glanced up to see whose chest it was, and uttered a single word, in awe:

“Steve.”

Steve’s heart rate sped up, and he held his boyfriend as close as possible, as if he never wanted to let him out of his sight again.  And although Bucky barely had enough strength to stand, he hugged Steve back with all his might.  In that moment, Steve rejoiced, and did not give a single thought to what Brooklyn might think or say.  He didn’t care.  Bucky lived, and that was all that mattered.

They walked out of the facility hand in hand, and together at the head of the victory parade, they led the liberated 400 men of the 107th back to their base on foot.  When they reached the camp, everyone cheered and greeted them as heroes, and Steve’s heart soared.  He couldn’t remember feeling prouder about anything in his entire life.

The crowd parted, and suddenly Peggy Carter was there.  She stood right in front of him and looked up at him with a smile.  He could see his pride echoed in her eyes too – as well it should be, since he couldn’t have done it without her help.  He smiled back at her as the crowd continued to cheer.

 _Ask her to dance,_ his brain told him.  _What are you waiting for?  You’re the victorious hero now, it’s your moment!  Ask her!_

“Hey, uh…”

“Hey!  Let’s hear it for Captain America!” Bucky shouted, loud enough to be heard over the entire unit.  Steve turned around, and saw pure love in Bucky’s eyes.  He glanced back at Peggy, who was still looking at him as if expecting him to say something.

“Yes?” she prompted politely.

“Uh… will you excuse me for a minute?” Steve muttered hurriedly, then elbowed his way through the crowd and ran to find a secluded, quiet spot where he could think in peace.

Peggy’s face and Bucky’s face both filled his brain and he could not think of anything else.  Here he was, Captain America, supposedly a specimen of humanity, incapable of asking a woman to dance.  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to dance with her, either.  He did, and he knew she would probably accept his invitation, too.  And he wasn’t sickly and frail anymore.  So why not ask?

Bucky Barnes existed.  Bucky Barnes understood him and did not judge him.  Bucky Barnes looked at him with pure love in his eyes that made the world light up like a thousand fireworks on the fourth of July.  When Steve looked at Bucky, he felt fulfilled somehow.  Complete.  Like a part of him that had been missing had finally returned home.

 _This isn’t right,_ Steve couldn’t help but think.  It had been ingrained in him since he was young.  _Those thoughts… they said men are supposed to be with women.  I can’t think about another man like that…_

His heart beat fast against his chest like a prisoner trying to escape, and he struggled to calm his breathing.  Suddenly, he felt so insecure again.  When he noticed that he couldn’t seem to breathe normally, he immediately assumed his asthma had returned, and he was terrified.

“Steve?” Peggy asked.

He glanced up, startled.  He hadn’t expected her to follow him.

“We’re missing you at the party,” she said softly.  Her voice was gentle. 

“Yeah, I… I needed some time,” he tried to explain.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

He shook his head.  “I don’t think I could… It’s not really a… I don’t want to bother you with this.”

Peggy sat down next to him and brushed her hair out of her eyes.  “Really, Steve, you should know that’s not a good enough excuse by now,” she scolded lightly.

“It’s really something I’d prefer to talk about with… with Erskine,” he admitted.  But Erskine was dead, and he would never be able to have this conversation.

“What’s the matter?” Peggy pressed onward.

“I don’t think the serum worked as well as he thought it did,” Steve whispered, almost afraid to say the words aloud.  “Or maybe it worked for a little while, but… I think it must be wearing off.”

Peggy looked incredulous.  “Why on Earth do you say that?  You’re the hero of the hour!  You’ve just rescued 400 prisoners of war from behind enemy lines and returned to base without losing any of them!  Isn’t this what you wanted, some actual action?”

“Well, yeah,” Steve admitted, “but there’s… there’s something I haven’t told you about.”

He fell silent then.  He didn’t know how to tell her, or even if he wanted to tell her.  What would she think of him if she knew?  Everyone looked up to him for being Captain America, but if they knew he was still sick like he had been before, they would surely abandon him.  They sure hadn’t liked him much before he became an icon.

Peggy was gazing carefully at his face.  Even though the daylight was waning, she could tell what kinds of thoughts must be going through that mind.  She thought back to the way he had jumped when she’d said the unit number 107, and the way he had come marching back into camp with Sergeant Barnes at his side.  She had seen the way Bucky Barnes looked at Steve Rogers as they marched together, and she had seen the look Steve gave him in return.  Peggy Carter knew that look well, and in that moment, she would have bet everything she had that she knew what was bothering Captain America.

“If you love him,” she whispered, very softly, “you should let him know.”

Steve stared at her, processing what she had just said.  “Wh-what?” he stammered, confused.

“Sergeant Barnes,” she explained.  “Does he know how you feel?”

“Yes,” he said, still bewildered.  “But… how did you?”

“But what I’m confused about is why you think this means the serum didn’t work,” Peggy said at the same time.

Steve paused for a moment before answering.  “Well, it… Erskine said it would cure all my illnesses.”

“It did, didn’t it?” Peggy asked.  “You don’t have scarlet fever anymore, do you?”

“Well no, I don’t have scarlet fever, but…”

“Steve, liking men and women both is perfectly alright,” Peggy stated.  “It’s not a disease.  It’s love.”  She waited a while to let that sink in before continuing.  “There is a girl I know back in New York.  Her name is Angie.  We’re very close.  A lot of people have called us best friends.  But if she asked, I would go with this girl.  I would live with her, just like married couples do.  Do you know what I mean?”

Steve nodded.  He would do the same for Bucky, and he knew she could tell.

“You’re not sick,” she explained.  “You are strong, and brave, and courageous, and incredibly dedicated to those you care about, but you are not sick.  And Sgt. Barnes and I would both really like to see you at the celebrations.”

He smiled then, and stood up, brushing his uniform off a little.  “Well then, Agent Carter, if you would do me the honor of accompanying me back into base,” he began, and offered her his arm.  She took it, and they walked back toward the crowd together.

“How should I even talk to Bucky the way I want to in front of all these people though?” he muttered to her under his breath as they walked.

“Well,” Peggy thought out loud, “I think I would start with the phrase, ‘May I have this dance?’”


End file.
